Notes on Face à Gaïa (Lecture 3)

Remember, these are just some notes on the book. They are provisional and unedited. No responsibility claimed: take them or leave them!

Galileo

Galileo’s discovery was that the Earth is a planet like any other.

Thus, he was prompted to conceive of homogenous, universal space in which all material bodies could be housed: ‘l’espace indifférencié pouvait désormais s’étendre partout’. As Latour puts it later in the chapter, he was bound to ‘étendre l’espace à tout pour y placer chaque acteur à l’intérieur, partes extra partes’.

The reason Galileo is associated with this origin is that he dis-incarnated man from his local situation, fostering in its place a new metaphysics based on primary qualities (movement and extension) as opposed to secondary qualities (the local agency of actors). In particular, this was the ‘view from nowhere’: ‘l’idée d’un point de vue de nulle part qui permettait à des esprits désincarnés et interchangeables d’écrire les lois applicables à tout le cosmos’.

Galileo’s metaphysics was celebrated and welcomed by the Moderns as a way of dignifying their (since previously they had been relegated to the sub-lunar): ‘ceux qui l’ont vécue se soient sentis libérés de leurs liens, après avoir si longtemps souffert d’être relégués dans un cul de basse fosse’. This was taken to be their ‘emancipation’ and thus becomes the foundation of the Modern Constitution.

Latour cites Brecht’s play for celebrating this crucial moment of bifurcation, in particular for the way in which it recognises Galileo as a turning-point: ‘the old has gone, the new has come’.

Lovelock

Contra Galileo, Lovelock’s discovery was that the Earth is in fact a planet unlike any other, that is, a ‘hapax’.

Why is the earth unique? Because of its disequilibrium, its messiness, its non-completedness and provisionality. None of these things are features of any other space in the universe:

What Gaia forces us to do is just what Pasteur did in his own way, namely, to progressively compose the common world: ‘se retrouver dans la Gaïa de Lovelock, c’est apprendre à redessiner les lignes de front entre amis et ennemis’.

As we have seen, there must be an agent that prevents the earth from collapsing into non-equilibrium. Latour notes the katechon connotation of this postulate and points forward to Lecture 7 in this book to take this further.

Thus, as we have seen, contrary to the impression his prose sometimes seems to give off, there is no concept of a ‘Totality’ in Lovelock: there is no ‘niveau supérieur, celui de la totalité’. Rather, there are only local agencies:‘obtenir des effets de connexions entre des puissances d’agir sans pour autant s’en remettre à une conception intenable de la totalité’.

That has all been described above. Thus, we can say that Lovelock’s method is to animate the world without over-animating into a whole: ‘comment suivre les connexions sans être holiste pour autant’.

Lovelock and Darwin

In the same way, Lovelock holds his theory against a mainstream (albeit mistaken) understanding of Darwinism, which we might call a faux-Darwinism:

In itself this would not be particularly contested by Darwinists, but what is perhaps radical about Gaia theory is that all beings (not just human or animal organisms) do this: ‘la capacité des humains à tout réarranger autour d’eux est une propriété générale des vivants’.

Thus, even if we might agree with the faux-Darwinists that organsisms are indeed striving for their survival, interest, propagation of the species, etc, when we introduce the panoply of other agencies the ituation is rendered so much more complex that faux-Darwinism is left behind: ‘les intérêts et les profits de chaque acteur seront contrecarrés par de nombreux autres programmes’.

The difference between faux-Darwinism and Gaia, then, is the difference between identifying wave patterns from a single stone thrown in a pond or from a band of cormorants diving in and out of the water all at once.

Figuration

This represents a useful nuance to our definition of ‘figuration’: we must always be careful to understand figuration (here described in terms of ‘waves’) as that which describes the complex interactions between agents, rather than the agents themselves:

If the Earth does change (‘emergence’), this will as a result of the thrusting agency of some opportunistic individual agent: ‘tous les effets d’échelle sont le résultat de l’expansion d’un agent particulièrement opportuniste saisissant sur-le-champ des occasions de se développer’.

The Earth is determined in time

If the Earth is dependent on operations of scale, it cannot be formatted as a space of res extensa; rather, it must be formatted as a space coupled with agency-in-time:

In fact, we could go even further as say that Gaia is in some way the definition of history: ‘ce qui veut dire qu’elle ressemble beaucoup à ce que nous avons fini par considérer comme l’histoire elle-même’.

Critical zone

The space of the Earth described above is the space of a ‘critical zone’: it persists only as long as the actors determine it: ‘il s’étend aussi loin que nous ; nous durons autant que ceux qui nous font respirer’.

2 thoughts on “Notes on Face à Gaïa (Lecture 3)”

In”What can explain the uniqueness of the Earth?” , on the one hand Lovelock presents the uniqueness of the Earth. But then Latour talks of its uniqueness as “maintained by the agents themselves, on a 1-level system, and nothing else”
If the second holds true is it not more reasonable to form expectations like:http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36256725

Is Latour’s Earth something like a nest of wormholes (like the ones relativity speaks about but really built with humanities’ material) that extend to all the Universe? Then the unique Erath is not the “unique planet Earth” (in everyday talk)